23rd Mar 2023 - LeiriaCON week
by Robin. Thu, 23 Mar (Updated at Thu, 23 Mar)For all our Portugal-based fans out there, this is your red-letter week. Thanks to the great sales pitch by Pedro and Elsa, we have a large contingent of our members over at LeiriaCON this year. So at a convention near you, for one weekend only, you can meet and play games with Ian and Paul, your favourite NPBGC club admins!
All of which meant it was a quiet night back at Ousebank House, and a chance for some more traditional games to have an outing. I've not seen Pandemic Iberia before - I guess it's another Pandemic variant (reimplementation, sorry) with a couple of new mechanics. It certainly had a similar runtime: they were on their 3rd playthrough by the time I left, not having had much success against the outbreaks up till that point. Hopefully they prevailed in the end.
And it was great to see Age Of Steam back again: one of the key milestones in the evolution of the train game, it's always a surprise how plain the board looks - but then it is over 20 years old now. They were also still going when I left - predictably, as this is a nice heavy game from what I remember.
So my table finished first, which I mention just because last week the group playing Mombasa were running on towards 11pm when everyone else left. This week, despite a rules explanation, we were all done by 10. Quicker thinkers? If you'd seen Andrew-H and me playing Vinhos you wouldn't think so, but it seems you play quicker when you make more mistakes, which we both did.
I'll leave my main write-up till after my tournament game, so my opinion can be moulded by how well I do. So far this one hasn't really hooked me, but it's early days. Andrew-T made a winning return to the club after his time out injured, while the rest of us were busy learning from all our mistakes. Assuming we've made all the available mistakes now, we should be well set for the tournament 🙂